Getting started with PCB design

Status
This old topic is closed. If you want to reopen this topic, contact a moderator using the "Report Post" button.
I recently installed Kicad on two Macs and it worked just fine. I used Safari to download it. The files are rather large and when you open it the first time you need to right click --> open . Double click will not work.

That being said I feel the EasyEda is much easier to use for beginners. It also appears to be less demanding for the cpu.
 
I recently installed Kicad on two Macs and it worked just fine. I used Safari to download it. The files are rather large and when you open it the first time you need to right click --> open . Double click will not work.

That being said I feel the EasyEda is much easier to use for beginners. It also appears to be less demanding for the cpu.

I have to disagree.
If learning an EDA from scratch, why start with a simpler, more limited tool?
KiCad is not hard to use. Sure there are no atomic parts, but I find that to be an asset being able to just swap footprint and not the whole part.
I've tried them all, except the ones that cost like a new car. I keep coming back to KiCad.
It's fast to use once the keybindings are in your musclememory.
 
I just talked about my own experience, but I'm very new to this. I'm sure you have a point. KiCad was a bit slow for me and crashed frequently. EasyEDA was very intuitive. Just my two cents.

TBH, I don't have all that much experience with mac OS.
The KiCad nightly ran poorly on windows 10, I've mainly used GNU/Linux the last couple of years.

On linux both the stable version of KiCad and the nightly runs just fine.
 
That used to be true in the early 4.0.x days, but having more users on Windows than other OS and therefore lots of bug reports and fixes, has made KiCad 5.1.5 on Windows 10 very stable
KiCad does benefit a lot from a SSD disk though.

I only have SSD drives in my stationary PC. Custom loop and quite OC'ed.
I don't know if it was the one install, it crashed every time I went from schematic to "update PCB" . No more read netlist button.

Earlier install ran flawless.
 
I think it was just the roll of the dice when you got your various nightlies. Sometimes they're good, and sometimes they're not. But generally speaking no platform is more/less buggy than the others these days. (Note that this was definitely not the case in times past.)

I'm on MacOS and I'm running the 6.0 development version (ie: the equivalent of the nightlies).
 
I think it was just the roll of the dice when you got your various nightlies. Sometimes they're good, and sometimes they're not. But generally speaking no platform is more/less buggy than the others these days. (Note that this was definitely not the case in times past.)

I'm on MacOS and I'm running the 6.0 development version (ie: the equivalent of the nightlies).
That's likely true.
The thing I like about linux, it updates to the next nightly with a simple text command.
No need to uninstall and reinstall the next version.
 
Status
This old topic is closed. If you want to reopen this topic, contact a moderator using the "Report Post" button.